“Yeah, well, that’s in the toilet now,” Douglas said.
“I heard they got it on film,” Kathleen said. “A snuff film, basically. I heard MOMA’s already offered Osbourne a million bucks for it, but Osbourne can’t get it back from the cops.”
“Hey, who says irony is dead?” Douglas said.
No one accomplished much that day, which suited Roman fine. He kept one eye on the clock all morning long. He was nagged by the knowledge that he had left a lot out of his account: not so much about John, but about John and himself. The bitterness with which they fought at the end — well, with which Roman fought: John, he remembered, was mostly just taken aback. Too startled to defend himself against the force of Roman’s feelings of betrayal. And that was how it had all ended between them — the partnership, and there was a friendship there that ended, too.
Roman ate his lunch on the subway. Evgenia greeted him with a solemn look when she emerged from class into the cubby room, as if this were a gravely unusual occasion, having Daddy pick her up from school.
“Did you remember I was coming?” he said cheerfully, stroking her hair.
They didn’t even take their coats off at home; Jo, anxious to get going, already had the baby in the stroller and the diaper bag packed. She kissed them goodbye on the corner of Broadway and went off to work, and Roman and the kids walked to the playground.
Isaac was asleep in the stroller by the time they got there. Roman pulled the canopy down to keep the sun off his face. Evvie saw some friends from school and ran off to play. Roman sat on the bench, watched her for a while, watched all the kids enjoy their noisy sovereignty.
He was secretly thrilled, on a kind of secondary level, that this whole pretentious Palladio effort had failed so spectacularly. He felt he had known it all along, though certainly no one could have predicted the form in which this failure would come. But he was also self-aware enough to be unsettled by the depth, the intensity, of that thrill. It had a bitter quality, in fact. Palladio’s success, while it lasted, had eaten at him. Not just in the way of jealousy, either, nor in the sense that he felt a private humiliation at being proven wrong (for he never accepted that he had been wrong). It was more that it made him feel alienated, profoundly so, though from what, he wasn’t sure. He just didn’t want to live in a world that took people like Mal Osbourne seriously.
Still, there had to be something going on down there that nobody was talking about, something that had wrought such a change in everybody. What was it? Maybe it would all emerge in time.
It stirred him up, as he sat on the bench, hands in pockets, surrounded by the penned energy of a bunch of five- and six-year-olds at the start of their weekend. And all emotions, as they escalated, eventually converged in one place with Roman, and that place was anger. He was angry all over again that someone as thoughtful as John could have made such a stupid decision — by which he meant the decision to move to Charlottesville in the first place — and thrown away the promise of his life. He was angry all over again at John for lying to him. And there was Osbourne himself, and the woman, whoever she was, and the reporters who had already started to pick them apart for the sake of the common amusement until there was nothing left of them at all.
“Daddy,” Evvie said. She was suddenly standing right beside him. “Did you bring snacks?”
He looked through the diaper bag and found a bag of Wheat Thins Jo had tucked in there.
“Here you go,” he said.
She looked at him with that air of detachment, that air of taking his existence, as a parent, entirely for granted.
“Why are you mad?” she said.
Roman, startled, said, “I’m not mad, sweetie.”
Evvie lost interest; she took the bag of Wheat Thins from his hand and ran off. Roman saw her sharing them with some girls he didn’t recognize. Maybe Evvie had just met them. She formed these instant friendships all the time.
That was the hard part, he found, about spending any extended time with the kids. You had to be so careful not to show them what you were feeling. They could only understand it, at that age, as something either directed at or caused by themselves somehow; and so you had to hide it from them. And then maybe it wound up emerging, hours or days later, with your wife or a telemarketer who called during dinner or some idiot on the street who didn’t pick up after his dog; or in some other inappropriate way.
* MESSAGE *
As we enjoy today’s Super Bowl, let’s remember that Americans of all races and ethnic groups are on the same team. Working together we can win.
On Mr Olivo’s wish list are Elvis Presley, Dag Hammarskjold, Jimi Hendrix, “maybe Nelson Mandela”
Self-expression is everything.
In this, the season of giving, the gift of freedom is the
greatest gift of all.
Become unaffected;
Cherish sincerity;
Belittle the personal;
Reduce desires.
SELLING THE GOVERNMENT LIKE SOAP; IT
SEEMS TO WORK
A people who do not dream never attain to inner sincerity, for only in his dreams is a man really himself. Only for his dreams is a man responsible — his actions are what he must do. Actions are a bastard race to which a man has not given his full paternity.
*
JOHN STAYED IN South Carolina, in the spare bedroom of the condo by the golf course, for a month, seeing to the disposition of his mother’s effects, as well as, quite unexpectedly, the sale of her home; for Buzz, it turned out, with a lack of decorum that seemed all the more astonishing given his historically passive and unflappable manner, announced his engagement to a widow who lived in the same development. We only get one life, he told John with a sympathetic smile, and she and I are too old to lose any more time to appearances. The widow’s brother had a place on Boca Grande which he was too infirm now to use; and so John found himself standing in the driveway waving to them, his mother’s widower and a woman he had never met until a week ago, as they drove off to Florida to live out the rest of their lives.
The condo sold quickly (John, who had always found the place somewhat featureless and numbing, was surprised to learn that there was a waiting list of prospective residents), and when the buyers called him there one evening to ask politely if he would be willing to throw in his parents’ old furniture as well, he couldn’t think of any reason to say no. He hung up and looked around the place — the sectional sofa, the big glass coffee table, the gigantic armoire with the gigantic TV in it — feeling a strange and ambiguous sort of awe at the seamlessness with which his mother’s final home would pass into the hands of amiable strangers in about a month’s time.
He would have to be around then for the closing; time enough, certainly, to head back up to Charlottesville and see what required his help. But after putting it off for a day or two, John admitted to himself that he wasn’t all that anxious to get back, at least not right now. Things weren’t the same. Living in a hotel room; working all day in a tiny spare office that didn’t belong to them; and the work itself — there simply wasn’t much of it at this point. Long hours that summer had been passed sitting idly at his borrowed desk, trying only to be unobtrusive while Mal, with his fingers laced in his hair and a look of vengeful determination on his face, thought.
Finally John called Mal at Shays’s office. Mal was actually somewhat brusque on the phone, even before John got around to the subject of his call.